State Convention - —Interconvertible Notes. 239 
upon note and bond, which debts have been increased under our 
greenback currency, shall be enabled to meet those obligations, to 
pay their debts, their bank debts, their mortgage debts, under a 
system of contraction of the currency which seems to be necessar}^ 
in the event that the government assumes to resume payment in 
specie of its outstanding indebtedness. 
President Bascom: You seem to be pretty well agreed on one 
point, and that is that a prime feature in a good currency is stabil¬ 
ity. Certainly all working-men require stability in prices. I know 
of none but speculators that can be profited by instability in prices. 
It has been questioned here, to-day, whether gold furnishes such 
stability. What I have to say, I wish to say to that point. I cannot 
feel that Dr. Steele has materially affected this question by what he 
has presented to-day, because what he said in reference to gold, has 
been said in reference to it as being taken in connection wuth a pa¬ 
per-currency. If I have a yard-stick made up of two metals, one of 
four-fifths and one of one-fifth, and I know r the four-fifths is capa¬ 
ble of any degree of contraction and expansion, I cannot consent 
that it be measured by the contraction and expansion of any other 
yard-stick. So, what gold will do in connection with a paper-cur- 
currency, subject to paper, is not a fit comparison. I wish to urge 
the stability of gold. 
First, the large amount of gold in the world. The whole civilized 
world is in large possession of this one commodity, and has been 
accumulating that possession for many thousands of years, so that 
the whole amount of gold in the world is oceanic. We cannot 
easily modify the price of wheat in Minnesota by ordinary demand, 
because of the amount of wheat in that market. You cannot easily 
affect the depth of the ocean by dipping out of the ocean, because 
it is the ocean. You cannot affect the amount of gold because it 
is oceanic. 
There is a great evenness of the demand in the world in refer¬ 
ence to gold. That demand is spread over all the world. It is like 
the evaporation over the ocean-surface. If there is evaporation in 
one tropic there are rains descending in another, and the whole 
amount of water being taken out and returned to the ocean as a 
whole is exceedingly even. Take the world, the use of, and return * 
of gold that is escaping from that use, is exceedingly even; there¬ 
fore, the value of gold should remain stable. Gold is fluent; the 
